The homeostasis scale: why "it will get better" sells more than "it is good"

A patient lies in a hospital bed after a difficult operation and feels better than yesterday. A business owner with growing revenue looks at the first signs of a slowdown and cannot fall asleep. The first is objectively in a bad place, the second in a good one. Yet the first feels lighter and the second feels heavy.

The difference is not the point where each of them stands. It is the direction in which each of them is moving. That is the homeostasis scale: is a person moving towards balance, or away from it?

Homeostasis sounds like a word from a biology textbook, but the idea is simple. Any system, the body, the psyche, even a mood before a purchase, keeps trying to return to equilibrium. When something knocks it off course, it works to recover. What matters is not how hard it was shaken. What matters is where it is rolling now: back towards calm, or further into chaos.

For anyone who sells, this is the most useful detail in the whole theory. And for a company that sells into Russia from abroad, it explains a mistake I see again and again in translated advertising.

What people feel when things start to ease

There are two sensations everyone knows from their own life.

The first is relief: things start to ease. The problem is not solved yet, the money is still short, the conflict is still open. But something has moved in the right direction, and breathing gets easier. The stress has not gone anywhere, and the mood has already turned upwards.

The second is the opposite: things start to spiral. Everything is still bearable, there is no disaster, but you can feel the situation creeping downhill. Control is slipping through your fingers. Tension grows, although nothing terrible has actually happened yet.

The level of stress can be identical in both cases, and the experience is reversed. The brain reads the direction of a signal, not its loudness. Your customer is rarely at a clean point of “everything is bad” or “everything is great”. They are always moving somewhere, and their readiness to buy is set by that movement.

Why direction matters more than position

Take two business owners. The first saw revenue drop by a third, hit a cash gap, borrowed money and launched a new service. Sales started coming in. He is still in the hole, but climbing, calm and working to a plan. The second just had the best year in the company’s history, but noticed that inquiries arrive a little more slowly. On paper everything is fine. Inside there is alarm, because the vector has changed.

Who is easier to sell a growth tool to? The second. He feels the ground shifting and looks for something to hold. The first has already found his channel.

The practical conclusion: position the product as movement towards a good state, rather than as the state itself. “With us it will get better” instead of “with us you will be fine”. “We will get you out of the hole” instead of “we are the best choice on the market”. A promise of movement hooks harder than a promise of a point.

A “beautiful website” is a point. A “website after which you get twice the inquiries” is movement. People buy the trajectory they expect to follow after the deal.

Strong offers almost always contain an arrow from A to B. A language school sells “in six months you hold a job interview in English without freezing”, not “knowledge of English”. Outsourced accounting sells “you stop being afraid of the tax office”, not “we keep your books”. A point does not create desire. Desire comes from the gap between where a person is now and where they want to be.

Three states: pulling together, standing still, falling apart

The scale breaks down into three positions, and each one is recognisable in a real person within seconds.

The system is pulling together. Everything inside works to restore balance. The person is calm and confident, with a sense of “I have this under control”. Energy is spent purposefully, on closing the problem. This is the best state for complex decisions and large purchases. Pressure is unnecessary here. Support is what helps: confirm that the path is right and help them walk it faster.

The system is standing still. Balance has been reached and nothing much is moving. For one person this is long-awaited peace, for another boredom. A bored person is an excellent audience for a new experience: they want something to happen.

The system is falling apart. The mismatch grows and control drops: anxiety, panic, the feeling of losing the wheel. Energy here is spent chaotically. The person does not act, they thrash, and people in this state do not make considered purchases. They freeze, flee, or grab the first straw within reach. So do not load a panicking client with a long price list and comparison tables. Give one clear action.

How the states combine into real scenarios

The homeostasis scale is one of three axes of perception I write about on this blog. The first is how personally a situation concerns me. The second is how hard it presses. The third is where it is all moving. Put them together and you get a three-dimensional map of states instead of the flat label “the client is nervous”.

A couple of combinations show how this works. The situation is personal, the pressure is strong, and the vector points towards balance: this is productive anger, mobilisation, “I am solving my problem and I can see how”. The same situation with the same pressure and the vector reversed: this is panic and helplessness, “the problem is swallowing me”. Equal intensity, opposite behaviour.

Another example. The problem barely concerns the person, and the vector points towards balance: calm sympathy, “they will manage”. Flip the vector and you get anxious watching, “they are not coping, and I hope this does not reach me”. From the first mood a person likes your post. From the second they close the tab.

Each state reads the same ad and the same price differently. The marketer’s job is to guess in which state the person opened your ad, rather than average everyone into a “target audience”.

Reading the vector in Russian channels

Before any communication, ask one question: is my customer moving towards balance or away from it? The answer changes the whole message, and in Russia you can often read it from the channel itself.

Search and feed behave differently here, much as they do on Google and Meta, but the platforms are different. A person who typed a query into Yandex was looking for a solution on their own initiative. More often than not they are composed and already on the right path. A person reached by an ad in the Yandex Advertising Network or in a VK feed was interrupted while doing something else, and if the ad was anxious, it may have pushed them into the spiralling state. In Yandex Direct it pays to write separate ads for these two vectors, rather than one text stretched over search and network placements.

The other signals are the same anywhere. Words: “it has got a bit easier, but I want to lock it in” is movement towards balance. “Everything is falling apart, I do not know what to grab first” is movement away. Numbers, if you can see them in the client’s business: a curve going up after a dip, or down after a peak.

If the customer is moving towards balance, support the movement. Say “you are on the right track, we will help you get there faster”, and do not frighten them. An ad for a growing business should sound calm and sure: “let’s speed this up together”, not “save yourself”.

If the customer is moving away from balance, offer a turn. They are already at the limit, so adding volume does not help. Clarity of direction does: “the situation is getting worse, here are three steps that will turn it around”.

The main mistake: frightening someone who is already falling

The most common error in advertising looks logical and does not work: “everything is getting worse, so buy our product”. The idea is clear enough. Highlight the pain so the person rushes for rescue. In practice you push a system that is already falling further away from balance.

A system in disarray does not buy. It freezes or runs, and you get a closed tab instead of an inquiry. Fear sells worse than people assume, because it paralyses more often than it mobilises.

For a foreign company this mistake has a specific form. The Russian campaign is usually translated from copy tuned at home, and that copy was written for a buyer in another state. A pain-heavy headline that worked on a calm, settled audience lands on Russian readers who may already be under strain, and the same words push them further from balance. The translation is accurate and the effect is reversed. My interpretation: this is one reason translated campaigns underperform even when the targeting is correct.

What works instead: acknowledge that things are hard, briefly, without speculating on fear. Then immediately give a vector towards balance: “yes, it is difficult right now, here is the path that makes it easier”. You are turning the movement around instead of frightening harder. The brain grabs the direction towards calm, because that is what it wants every second.

A caveat about honesty. Turning someone towards balance does not mean rosy promises out of thin air. If you promise upward movement, you need concrete steps the client will actually walk. Otherwise the vector flips back after the purchase, and the person remembers you as the one who promised rescue and did not deliver. An empty promise of movement works once. Honest movement works for years.

What to do before your next Russian launch

Check every text by a single test: does this message push the reader towards balance or away from it? If after your ad the customer feels more anxious and more confused, you are working against yourself, however competent the copy looks. If they exhale and see a road, you have hit the mark.

The same lens works for the whole funnel: where you calm people down, and where you accidentally wind them up. That is the kind of walkthrough we do in a free review, step by step, on real examples of your product and your Russian pages.

The short formula is worth remembering. People do not buy “good”. People buy “it will get better”. Sell them the road, not a point on the map.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Шкала гомеостаза: «станет лучше» сильнее «уже хорошо»